International Rescue Committee

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is a humanitarian aid organization that provides relief and development assistance worldwide. The IRC responds to emergencies involving population displacement resulting from war, civil conflict, or persecution based on ethnicity, religion, or political beliefs.

The IRC was founded in New York in 1933 at the request of Albert Einstein to aid people targeted by the Nazis in the months after Adolf Hitler's ascendancy in Germany. During and after World War II, the IRC aided refugees who had been uprooted by the fighting in Europe. Following the abortive Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the IRC stepped in and helped thousands of refugees who fled from Hungary into Austria. Since then, the organization has responded worldwide to virtually every major human-made humanitarian emergency.

The IRC also responds when a major natural disaster occurs in regions where it is operating. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the IRC conducted significant programs aiding people uprooted by turmoil in Haiti, Cuba, East Pakistan (Bangladesh), Nigeria (Biafra), Southeast Asia, Uganda, Afghanistan, Mozambique, Sudan, and Ethiopia. In the 1990s, it carried out major aid operations in responding to conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Burundi, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo, and Kosovo. More recently, the IRC assisted after the 2002 volcanic eruption in eastern Congo, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 South Asia earthquake, and the 2008 cyclone (Nargis) that devastated Myanmar. After the crisis ends, the IRC stays on the scene to help individuals and communities recover and rebuild.

In the first decade of the 21st century, the IRC carried out significant aid programs in 40 countries, and seconded staff to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in many of those countries, as well as in 31 additional countries. During this period, IRC emergency response teams responded to crises that caused major displacement in Afghanistan, The Ivory Coast, Liberia, Iraq, Sudan, Chad, Indonesia, Pakistan, Lebanon, Kenya, the Republic of Georgia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, and Sri Lanka.

The IRC maintains an emergency response team staffed by specialists with expertise in key areas necessary to assess critical survival needs and mount an effective response to sudden or protracted emergencies. The team includes coordinators, logisticians, physicians, and water and sanitation experts, as well as specialists who focus on human rights protection, the special needs of children in crisis, the prevention of sexual violence, and aid for rape survivors. The team also includes staff members experienced in grants development, program design, security, finance, and human resources. Members of the emergency response team are always on standby to deploy to a crisis within 72 hours, whether they are on the scene of an earlier emergency or have been seconded to an IRC country program. A roster of experienced IRC employees around the world, as well as qualified external personnel, are pre-interviewed and [Page 356]available on short notice for emergency deployment. The IRC also pre-positions equipment and supplies in key transport hubs so materials can be dispatched anywhere in the world on short notice.

The IRC's relief and development operations are funded by individual donors, corporations, and foundations, including Stichting Vluchteling, the Netherlands Refugee Foundation; intergovernmental agencies such as UNHCR; the European Union; and governmental disaster relief and development agencies in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, and Sweden, among others.

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